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Christopher Harding reviews Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovel

The rustle of vegetation in Southern Rhodesia as “Margaret Thatcher”, “James Bond” and “Chairman Mao” crept through the undergrowth. These were guerrilla fighters for the Zimbabwean African National Union. The attractions of famously flinty Brits aside, the soldiers' choices of noms de guerre reflected a deep ideological and tactical debt to Chinese Communism and to Maoism in particular.

Elsewhere during this time – the Sixties and Seventies – Africans going for eye tests found themselves squinting at excerpts, in ever diminishing font sizes, from the Little Red Book. Patients were greeted by Chinese doctors with the reassuring...